The Pied Pipers interview (1973)
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sutcliff_spaceSutcliff was interviewed by Emma Fisher in 1973 for a book entitled The Pied Pipers: Interviews with the Influential Creators of Children's Literature (edited by Fisher and Justin Wintle, 1974), which you can read here on Internet Archive. The interview contains quite a few interesting remarks, on her own books, on other people's books, and on her beliefs about the world in general.
There are spoilers for The Mark of the Horse Lord and Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.
THE PIED PIPERS INTERVIEW
Although Rosemary Sutcliff’s books relive history with passionate feeling, they are not escapist romances, and their appeal for many children lies in the fact that they are totally real. Sutcliff manages to keep a fine balance between the historical outlook – the fatalistic portrayal of events pushing her characters, the clash of civilizations or the ruinous consequence of war – and the novelist’s viewpoint. She allows the characters to work out their own destinies. The emotions grow naturally from the background, with such intensity that she has sometimes been under-valued as a sentimental writer. She won the Carnegie Medal in 1959 for The Lantern Bearers.
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in Surrey in 1920, and lived in various ports with her mother, as her father was a naval officer. Since early childhood she has suffered from a form of arthritis, making it difficult for her to move about, but this did not prevent her from training hard as an artist and becoming a professional miniaturist. A patriotic miniature, The Spirit of England, which she painted in the year of Dunkirk (1940), hung in the Royal Academy and was much talked about. She now lives and writes in a country cottage near Arundel in Sussex.
Q: I think you had a rather strange childhood, in that you didn’t have a formal education, did you?
A: No, I didn’t. Partly because my father was a sailor, and we traipsed around the world after him, and partly because I was very ill when I was a small child, and didn’t go to school; but my mother read aloud to me a great deal, and she would only read books she enjoyed. So that wiped out all the “tripe” of the day, and I only got the best of everything from Beatrix Potter to Dickens, all at the same time.
Q: Was that when you acquired your sense of history?
A: Yes. She was very very fond of historical novels, and historical stories in general, and I was brought up on Kipling – Puck of Pook’s Hill particularly – and various historical novels such as Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators, and things of this sort, and I think this was really my start, particularly my fondness for Roman Britain, and Roman times in general. I learnt about Beowulf and Middle English literature at the same early age – I was brought up on a book called Myths and Legends of the British Race.
Q: So as a child you didn’t read children’s books?
A: Not really. I read the odd Angela Brazil. But of course I didn’t learn to read until I was nine, I was read to, and when you can be read to, the books you can read for yourself are not so advanced and you get rather bored with them. Actually Kipling was the same – he couldn’t read until the was nine either – so I’m in good company. I don’t remember whether he had anybody to read to him, but I know his sister could read at the age of about four, and he said, “That’s because you don’t understand what it’s all about, and how difficult it is.” We had Beatrix Potter, and I loved The Wind in the Willows; and all Kipling’s so-called children’s books, and Treasure Island; but on the whole not very many children’s books, because I was so late coming to reading myself that I went straight into the adult ones. I came back to the children’s ones later, when I started writing.
Q: How much later was that?
A: I was into – I suppose – my early twenties. I started off as an artist, I was art-school trained, and I’ve got all my City and Guild certificates to prove it; I became a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. And then I started scribbling, and gradually got something published, and as I started to write more and more I had less and less to give to the painting. The writing was the important one, the writing went deepest in me. So little by little I left off the painting. The books just took over; I hadn’t got enough creative fire for both. This little desk that is now my writing desk was specially made as a painting desk.
Q: You started writing children’s books. Do you object to the classification, or do you think it is a necessary one?
A: I have got the four adult ones to my credit, but they’re no easier to write than the children’s ones – in some ways they’re harder. My sort have as big a canvas as the adult ones, but you have to write them to a certain extent with one hand tied behind your back. There are still certain things you mustn’t mention in a children’s book, and certain complexities of relationship and motivation, this kind of thing; and you have to get your effects in a slightly simpler way, whereas if you’re writing for an adult there’s nothing you can’t say or do.
Q: Can you give me an example?
A: After I’d written Sword at Sunset, I did an edited version for children, and they made me cut certain things – details of the battles, because they were too violent; and the fact that two of the soldiers were homosexuals, which was in fact a most natural thing to happen, and part of being a warrior. I discovered later that lots of children had been reading the adult version and loving it!
Q: There is quite a lot of homosexual feeling in your books, or at least very passionate friendship between people of the same sex. Is this part of the historical background (more plausible in the kind of society you write about than friendships between the sexes)? Or is this way of writing about love particularly suited to children’s (older children’s) books?
A: I would, I think, agree with you in all these suggestions, but add that I write mostly about men in a man’s world, fighting men; and the homosexual relationship, or at any rate very deep friendship between men, tends very much to occur in this type of society. I imagine the warrior “blood brother” relationship was often far closer to the homosexual than to any kind of brotherhood, though possibly the men themselves were not aware of this.
Q: The sort of cuts you made in Sword at Sunset wouldn’t be necessary now, would they?
A: I think perhaps not. And if the child is caught by your book, his imagination is caught, even if the relationship is complicated; they don’t mind being stretched, they sort of hop along in your wake, and understand what they can. They can understand kind of through the pores of their skin; things that are beyond them mentally they can often take in intuitively. But one can’t count on that.
Q: The soldierly heroic virtues, courage and friendship, seem to mean a great deal to you.
A: They do. I had a very Spartan mother, and was brought up rather like a boy, and I do appreciate the heroic virtues.
Q: Do you look for them in your material?
A: This is one of the reasons that I like writing historical novels, whereas I don’t think I could write modern ones.
Q: Doesn’t one find those virtues in the present?
A: Not in quite the same undiluted form.
Q: How late in history can you still find them?
A: The latest period I’ve ever written about is the English Civil War (the seventeenth century). There are certain periods I can’t write: I can’t write later than the Civil War, that goes kind of “cloak and dagger” on me. And I can’t write Mediaeval England.
Q: Knight’s Fee manages all right, in the 1000s and 1100s.
A: I can manage that, but I can’t cope with – say from 1200 to 1500.
Q: I wonder why?
A: I don’t know – I think I can’t accept a world which is quite so absolutely impregnated with religion; the terrific hold that the Church had in every facet of life. I can’t understand it. In the period of Knight’s Fee, it hadn’t really got this terrific hold that it got later. After the late Norman times, I just don’t understand the people.
Q: Yet you can put yourself in the place of people who followed the old religions – the people in, say, Warrior Scarlet.
A: I think I have a very strong feeling for the old and primitive religions. I read Frazer’s The Golden Bough in all its – is it eight volumes? I couldn’t afford it, so I read it in a bookshop, where the keeper was a great friend of mine; I used to go back every week and hurriedly skim through a little bit more. I treated myself eventually to the abridged edition, and then of course went much deeper into it. The Golden Bough is I suppose a bit dated now, but it’s still the basic book on the primitive faiths. I’m much more at home with the Bronze Age things, the fertility cult, witchcraft, than with mediaeval Catholicism.
Q: Do you count as Church of England?
A: I always put C of E on documents, but I’m such an unorthodox Christian that I rather doubt if I can claim to be a Christian. I don’t even really believe that Christ was different in kind than other people – only in degree.
Q: This is the Arian heresy – that Christ is not consubstantial with God. Do you think Christ was a particularly gifted and influential human being, rather than the son of God?
A: I think that Christ was one of the great masters and leaders who appear from time to time – Buddha was another – men who are a kind of special flowering of humanity. If one believes in reincarnation, and I think I do, one might say that he was a complete soul who had finished with incarnation, but made the supreme sacrifice of coming back once more, to live that particular life and die that particular death, because it was needed.
Q: There often appears to be a kind of pagan fatalism in your books. The country, and certain artifacts, live on while the people suffer and die according to their destinies. Do the objects which appear in more than one of your books symbolize this? I mean the flint axe in Knight’s Fee and Warrior Scarlet, and the flawed emerald ring in the Roman books.
A: No, they’re not symbols; it’s just continuity. I’ve got this terrific thing about continuity; they’re the same hills in Knight’s Fee as in Warrior Scarlet, and it suddenly came to me when writing Knight’s Fee that I’d use the flint axe to show the continuity.
Q: Do you see men as relatively small compared with the background against which they are set?
A: No. I always feel very involved with the people, and very unable to see the wood for the trees, when I’m writing about them. But I am able to get involved with either side.
Q: There are two “sides” you often make a distinction between – the people who know about civilization, and the people who know about life, say the Romans and the Britons, or Saxons and Celts. The people of the day and the people of the night. Do you feel something is lost in civilizing?
A: I think the distinctions are more blurred than they were, but I think this one still exists to a certain extent. The same things are now lost in civilizing – I won’t say uncivilized people, but people who have a different civilization than one’s own. You lose spontaneity, you lose contact with the life force. That’s something one can’t correct; it’s a dichotomy which just exists.
Q: In Knight’s Fee the central character is a blend of two races, Breton and Saxon. When one race overtakes another, do you think they should mingle into one? Is that what the book is about?
A: I think is is a good idea; I think it always happens. Possibly not a good idea in the first generation in certain cases. I think the old prejudices against interracial marriages – between black and white for instance – can be pretty difficult in the first generation or two, because they are a very different racial type. But there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t eventually happen. When you get a combination like say Celt and Saxon, probably it’s a very good blend – the perhaps rather more solid Saxon side and the fire of the Celtic side come together and make a good mixture.
Q: The Celtic side provides the leaven.
A: I think the Saxon side is more stolid. Mind you I’m absolutely pure Saxon myself, we’re from the North country and as far as we know haven’t a trace of Celt in us. But I always feel in a way more at home with the Celt than with the Saxon. I feel I know the way their minds work – this thinking in circles that a Celt can do. The Saxon is a bit like the Roman; he thinks in a straight line.
Q: What’s your attitude to the present, the time from which you look back at these happenings?
A: As I said, I’m never at all certain that I don’t believe in reincarnation. I rather think I do. In which case one does know the other times, and one can go back. I think the present – 1973 – is a very exciting time to be living in, but I don’t think it is altogether to my taste.
Q: You’ve lived another life in Roman Britain?
A: Yes. This is possibly the reason that a lot of writers have this thing, as I was saying just now, about not being able to write about certain periods. Whereas other periods and places one feels completely at home in. This could be explained if they were the places and periods you hadn’t experienced yourself, in an earlier life.
Q: So you don’t find it too hard to think yourself into the period you’re writing about?
A: I mug up the history I need, and then I forget and mug up the next piece. I think I’ve got the trick of catching the feeling of a period.
Q: Is it difficult to make people talk in a convincing way?
A: I find it very difficult. I think I’ve evolved a style now which has a faintly archaic sound without being pish-tushery, but at the same time isn’t quite modern English. I think the thing to remember is that people use the speech of their day, which sounds completely modern and normal to them, and if you get something too archaic, it sounds unreal, and comes between them and the reality of the story. There was a time when 1066 was now for people just as real as us.
Q: There are certain similarities between your books and those of Mary Renault; are you an admirer of hers?
A: Oh yes. I get completely carried away by her books. At the end of The Last of the Wine – when Alexis sees Lysis on the bier and the broken sandal strap – I couldn’t believe it, it was like coming up to a car accident and seeing it is somebody you know. I turned back three pages and read it again, expecting it to be different this time – I couldn’t bear it. I was slightly afraid when I produced Flowers for Adonis [sic] – about Alcibiades – that I might be trespassing on her territory.
Q: What do you think of the strong elements of fantasy in children’s writing these days – the classic example being Tolkien?
A: I think he’s a very difficult writer. Very difficult to understand, and perhaps not really appropriate for children. I think he’s an adult writer masquerading to a certain extent. Adults tend to think that something which is on the surface a fairy story isn’t meant for them, but I think in this case it is.
Q: Do you prefer a more realistic writer like William Mayne?
A: I think he writes beautifully, his books are poet’s books, but I never get very involved in the people. They have a slight sameness. And he’s utterly unaware of the nuances of different kinds of backgrounds. His children’s fathers, whether they are lawyers or lorry-drivers, all have exactly the same sense of humour, which people don’t, straight through society; and their children all call them Daddy, which again people don’t, all through society. This kind of thing. And therefore to a certain extent his books lack reality.
Q: Have you ever been tempted to write about magic, an unreal world impinging on a real one?
A: No, I’ve always been very well rooted on the ground. There’s just an occasional touch of the supernatural here and there in the earlier ones. I think I’m very circumstantial in my books: I get terribly bothered by things like loose ends in the plot. And in other people’s plots – I get frightfully bothered when it doesn’t tie up.
Q: You seem to have a favourite plot line – people who have a goal or achievement ahead of them, getting their Warrior Scarlet or becoming a Knight. They almost fail, but succeed in the end in spite of great obstacles.
A: Some people do say that writers have only one plot, and I think really I’ve only got one plot; a boy growing up and finding himself, and finding his own soul in the process, and achieving the aim he sets out to achieve; or not achieving it, and finding his own soul in the process of not achieving it. And becoming part of society.
Q: It is a sad process in a way.
A: Yes; it is a sad process. Quite often I get involved in unhappy endings to my books; in The Mark of the Horse Lord I had actually to make my hero kill himself. I tried and tried to find a way out for him, but the shape of the story demanded it, and that was that. I get terribly involved with my own people, and very moved by them myself, so it’s always good to hear that other people have been moved.
Q: Is it a good thing – something to aim for?
A: Oh yes. It stretches their emotions and I’m sure this is good. I think with children it helps them to grow and develop. It’s educational in a way, education in living.
Q: You’ve lately done your telling of Tristan and Iseult, and The Witch’s Brat for younger children – what else is on the way?
A: There’s this little book, The Capricorn Bracelet, which is being published in two days’ time. It’s set in Roman Scotland. I feel terribly at home in Roman Britain – I feel here I am again in my own stamping ground. I’m slightly ashamed of feeling so at home among the Romans, because they were an awful bourgeois lot, but there we are.
Q: Do your readers like the Romans as much as you do?
A: Well, I get a lot of fan letters, generally saying: How did you come to be a writer, how long does it take you, how can I become one; sometimes they inquire anxiously about particular characters – did so-and-so find a nice wife, and this kind of thing, which I find really rather touching, because one feels they have become really involved, and the people are real to them. One fan letter I had once, years and years ago, said, broadly speaking: “Dear Miss Sutcliff, I enjoy your books very much, and I hope that when you are dead you will go on writing books and I can go on reading them.”
Sussex, 1973
There are spoilers for The Mark of the Horse Lord and Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine.
THE PIED PIPERS INTERVIEW
Although Rosemary Sutcliff’s books relive history with passionate feeling, they are not escapist romances, and their appeal for many children lies in the fact that they are totally real. Sutcliff manages to keep a fine balance between the historical outlook – the fatalistic portrayal of events pushing her characters, the clash of civilizations or the ruinous consequence of war – and the novelist’s viewpoint. She allows the characters to work out their own destinies. The emotions grow naturally from the background, with such intensity that she has sometimes been under-valued as a sentimental writer. She won the Carnegie Medal in 1959 for The Lantern Bearers.
Rosemary Sutcliff was born in Surrey in 1920, and lived in various ports with her mother, as her father was a naval officer. Since early childhood she has suffered from a form of arthritis, making it difficult for her to move about, but this did not prevent her from training hard as an artist and becoming a professional miniaturist. A patriotic miniature, The Spirit of England, which she painted in the year of Dunkirk (1940), hung in the Royal Academy and was much talked about. She now lives and writes in a country cottage near Arundel in Sussex.
Q: I think you had a rather strange childhood, in that you didn’t have a formal education, did you?
A: No, I didn’t. Partly because my father was a sailor, and we traipsed around the world after him, and partly because I was very ill when I was a small child, and didn’t go to school; but my mother read aloud to me a great deal, and she would only read books she enjoyed. So that wiped out all the “tripe” of the day, and I only got the best of everything from Beatrix Potter to Dickens, all at the same time.
Q: Was that when you acquired your sense of history?
A: Yes. She was very very fond of historical novels, and historical stories in general, and I was brought up on Kipling – Puck of Pook’s Hill particularly – and various historical novels such as Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators, and things of this sort, and I think this was really my start, particularly my fondness for Roman Britain, and Roman times in general. I learnt about Beowulf and Middle English literature at the same early age – I was brought up on a book called Myths and Legends of the British Race.
Q: So as a child you didn’t read children’s books?
A: Not really. I read the odd Angela Brazil. But of course I didn’t learn to read until I was nine, I was read to, and when you can be read to, the books you can read for yourself are not so advanced and you get rather bored with them. Actually Kipling was the same – he couldn’t read until the was nine either – so I’m in good company. I don’t remember whether he had anybody to read to him, but I know his sister could read at the age of about four, and he said, “That’s because you don’t understand what it’s all about, and how difficult it is.” We had Beatrix Potter, and I loved The Wind in the Willows; and all Kipling’s so-called children’s books, and Treasure Island; but on the whole not very many children’s books, because I was so late coming to reading myself that I went straight into the adult ones. I came back to the children’s ones later, when I started writing.
Q: How much later was that?
A: I was into – I suppose – my early twenties. I started off as an artist, I was art-school trained, and I’ve got all my City and Guild certificates to prove it; I became a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. And then I started scribbling, and gradually got something published, and as I started to write more and more I had less and less to give to the painting. The writing was the important one, the writing went deepest in me. So little by little I left off the painting. The books just took over; I hadn’t got enough creative fire for both. This little desk that is now my writing desk was specially made as a painting desk.
Q: You started writing children’s books. Do you object to the classification, or do you think it is a necessary one?
A: I have got the four adult ones to my credit, but they’re no easier to write than the children’s ones – in some ways they’re harder. My sort have as big a canvas as the adult ones, but you have to write them to a certain extent with one hand tied behind your back. There are still certain things you mustn’t mention in a children’s book, and certain complexities of relationship and motivation, this kind of thing; and you have to get your effects in a slightly simpler way, whereas if you’re writing for an adult there’s nothing you can’t say or do.
Q: Can you give me an example?
A: After I’d written Sword at Sunset, I did an edited version for children, and they made me cut certain things – details of the battles, because they were too violent; and the fact that two of the soldiers were homosexuals, which was in fact a most natural thing to happen, and part of being a warrior. I discovered later that lots of children had been reading the adult version and loving it!
Q: There is quite a lot of homosexual feeling in your books, or at least very passionate friendship between people of the same sex. Is this part of the historical background (more plausible in the kind of society you write about than friendships between the sexes)? Or is this way of writing about love particularly suited to children’s (older children’s) books?
A: I would, I think, agree with you in all these suggestions, but add that I write mostly about men in a man’s world, fighting men; and the homosexual relationship, or at any rate very deep friendship between men, tends very much to occur in this type of society. I imagine the warrior “blood brother” relationship was often far closer to the homosexual than to any kind of brotherhood, though possibly the men themselves were not aware of this.
Q: The sort of cuts you made in Sword at Sunset wouldn’t be necessary now, would they?
A: I think perhaps not. And if the child is caught by your book, his imagination is caught, even if the relationship is complicated; they don’t mind being stretched, they sort of hop along in your wake, and understand what they can. They can understand kind of through the pores of their skin; things that are beyond them mentally they can often take in intuitively. But one can’t count on that.
Q: The soldierly heroic virtues, courage and friendship, seem to mean a great deal to you.
A: They do. I had a very Spartan mother, and was brought up rather like a boy, and I do appreciate the heroic virtues.
Q: Do you look for them in your material?
A: This is one of the reasons that I like writing historical novels, whereas I don’t think I could write modern ones.
Q: Doesn’t one find those virtues in the present?
A: Not in quite the same undiluted form.
Q: How late in history can you still find them?
A: The latest period I’ve ever written about is the English Civil War (the seventeenth century). There are certain periods I can’t write: I can’t write later than the Civil War, that goes kind of “cloak and dagger” on me. And I can’t write Mediaeval England.
Q: Knight’s Fee manages all right, in the 1000s and 1100s.
A: I can manage that, but I can’t cope with – say from 1200 to 1500.
Q: I wonder why?
A: I don’t know – I think I can’t accept a world which is quite so absolutely impregnated with religion; the terrific hold that the Church had in every facet of life. I can’t understand it. In the period of Knight’s Fee, it hadn’t really got this terrific hold that it got later. After the late Norman times, I just don’t understand the people.
Q: Yet you can put yourself in the place of people who followed the old religions – the people in, say, Warrior Scarlet.
A: I think I have a very strong feeling for the old and primitive religions. I read Frazer’s The Golden Bough in all its – is it eight volumes? I couldn’t afford it, so I read it in a bookshop, where the keeper was a great friend of mine; I used to go back every week and hurriedly skim through a little bit more. I treated myself eventually to the abridged edition, and then of course went much deeper into it. The Golden Bough is I suppose a bit dated now, but it’s still the basic book on the primitive faiths. I’m much more at home with the Bronze Age things, the fertility cult, witchcraft, than with mediaeval Catholicism.
Q: Do you count as Church of England?
A: I always put C of E on documents, but I’m such an unorthodox Christian that I rather doubt if I can claim to be a Christian. I don’t even really believe that Christ was different in kind than other people – only in degree.
Q: This is the Arian heresy – that Christ is not consubstantial with God. Do you think Christ was a particularly gifted and influential human being, rather than the son of God?
A: I think that Christ was one of the great masters and leaders who appear from time to time – Buddha was another – men who are a kind of special flowering of humanity. If one believes in reincarnation, and I think I do, one might say that he was a complete soul who had finished with incarnation, but made the supreme sacrifice of coming back once more, to live that particular life and die that particular death, because it was needed.
Q: There often appears to be a kind of pagan fatalism in your books. The country, and certain artifacts, live on while the people suffer and die according to their destinies. Do the objects which appear in more than one of your books symbolize this? I mean the flint axe in Knight’s Fee and Warrior Scarlet, and the flawed emerald ring in the Roman books.
A: No, they’re not symbols; it’s just continuity. I’ve got this terrific thing about continuity; they’re the same hills in Knight’s Fee as in Warrior Scarlet, and it suddenly came to me when writing Knight’s Fee that I’d use the flint axe to show the continuity.
Q: Do you see men as relatively small compared with the background against which they are set?
A: No. I always feel very involved with the people, and very unable to see the wood for the trees, when I’m writing about them. But I am able to get involved with either side.
Q: There are two “sides” you often make a distinction between – the people who know about civilization, and the people who know about life, say the Romans and the Britons, or Saxons and Celts. The people of the day and the people of the night. Do you feel something is lost in civilizing?
A: I think the distinctions are more blurred than they were, but I think this one still exists to a certain extent. The same things are now lost in civilizing – I won’t say uncivilized people, but people who have a different civilization than one’s own. You lose spontaneity, you lose contact with the life force. That’s something one can’t correct; it’s a dichotomy which just exists.
Q: In Knight’s Fee the central character is a blend of two races, Breton and Saxon. When one race overtakes another, do you think they should mingle into one? Is that what the book is about?
A: I think is is a good idea; I think it always happens. Possibly not a good idea in the first generation in certain cases. I think the old prejudices against interracial marriages – between black and white for instance – can be pretty difficult in the first generation or two, because they are a very different racial type. But there’s no real reason why it shouldn’t eventually happen. When you get a combination like say Celt and Saxon, probably it’s a very good blend – the perhaps rather more solid Saxon side and the fire of the Celtic side come together and make a good mixture.
Q: The Celtic side provides the leaven.
A: I think the Saxon side is more stolid. Mind you I’m absolutely pure Saxon myself, we’re from the North country and as far as we know haven’t a trace of Celt in us. But I always feel in a way more at home with the Celt than with the Saxon. I feel I know the way their minds work – this thinking in circles that a Celt can do. The Saxon is a bit like the Roman; he thinks in a straight line.
Q: What’s your attitude to the present, the time from which you look back at these happenings?
A: As I said, I’m never at all certain that I don’t believe in reincarnation. I rather think I do. In which case one does know the other times, and one can go back. I think the present – 1973 – is a very exciting time to be living in, but I don’t think it is altogether to my taste.
Q: You’ve lived another life in Roman Britain?
A: Yes. This is possibly the reason that a lot of writers have this thing, as I was saying just now, about not being able to write about certain periods. Whereas other periods and places one feels completely at home in. This could be explained if they were the places and periods you hadn’t experienced yourself, in an earlier life.
Q: So you don’t find it too hard to think yourself into the period you’re writing about?
A: I mug up the history I need, and then I forget and mug up the next piece. I think I’ve got the trick of catching the feeling of a period.
Q: Is it difficult to make people talk in a convincing way?
A: I find it very difficult. I think I’ve evolved a style now which has a faintly archaic sound without being pish-tushery, but at the same time isn’t quite modern English. I think the thing to remember is that people use the speech of their day, which sounds completely modern and normal to them, and if you get something too archaic, it sounds unreal, and comes between them and the reality of the story. There was a time when 1066 was now for people just as real as us.
Q: There are certain similarities between your books and those of Mary Renault; are you an admirer of hers?
A: Oh yes. I get completely carried away by her books. At the end of The Last of the Wine – when Alexis sees Lysis on the bier and the broken sandal strap – I couldn’t believe it, it was like coming up to a car accident and seeing it is somebody you know. I turned back three pages and read it again, expecting it to be different this time – I couldn’t bear it. I was slightly afraid when I produced Flowers for Adonis [sic] – about Alcibiades – that I might be trespassing on her territory.
Q: What do you think of the strong elements of fantasy in children’s writing these days – the classic example being Tolkien?
A: I think he’s a very difficult writer. Very difficult to understand, and perhaps not really appropriate for children. I think he’s an adult writer masquerading to a certain extent. Adults tend to think that something which is on the surface a fairy story isn’t meant for them, but I think in this case it is.
Q: Do you prefer a more realistic writer like William Mayne?
A: I think he writes beautifully, his books are poet’s books, but I never get very involved in the people. They have a slight sameness. And he’s utterly unaware of the nuances of different kinds of backgrounds. His children’s fathers, whether they are lawyers or lorry-drivers, all have exactly the same sense of humour, which people don’t, straight through society; and their children all call them Daddy, which again people don’t, all through society. This kind of thing. And therefore to a certain extent his books lack reality.
Q: Have you ever been tempted to write about magic, an unreal world impinging on a real one?
A: No, I’ve always been very well rooted on the ground. There’s just an occasional touch of the supernatural here and there in the earlier ones. I think I’m very circumstantial in my books: I get terribly bothered by things like loose ends in the plot. And in other people’s plots – I get frightfully bothered when it doesn’t tie up.
Q: You seem to have a favourite plot line – people who have a goal or achievement ahead of them, getting their Warrior Scarlet or becoming a Knight. They almost fail, but succeed in the end in spite of great obstacles.
A: Some people do say that writers have only one plot, and I think really I’ve only got one plot; a boy growing up and finding himself, and finding his own soul in the process, and achieving the aim he sets out to achieve; or not achieving it, and finding his own soul in the process of not achieving it. And becoming part of society.
Q: It is a sad process in a way.
A: Yes; it is a sad process. Quite often I get involved in unhappy endings to my books; in The Mark of the Horse Lord I had actually to make my hero kill himself. I tried and tried to find a way out for him, but the shape of the story demanded it, and that was that. I get terribly involved with my own people, and very moved by them myself, so it’s always good to hear that other people have been moved.
Q: Is it a good thing – something to aim for?
A: Oh yes. It stretches their emotions and I’m sure this is good. I think with children it helps them to grow and develop. It’s educational in a way, education in living.
Q: You’ve lately done your telling of Tristan and Iseult, and The Witch’s Brat for younger children – what else is on the way?
A: There’s this little book, The Capricorn Bracelet, which is being published in two days’ time. It’s set in Roman Scotland. I feel terribly at home in Roman Britain – I feel here I am again in my own stamping ground. I’m slightly ashamed of feeling so at home among the Romans, because they were an awful bourgeois lot, but there we are.
Q: Do your readers like the Romans as much as you do?
A: Well, I get a lot of fan letters, generally saying: How did you come to be a writer, how long does it take you, how can I become one; sometimes they inquire anxiously about particular characters – did so-and-so find a nice wife, and this kind of thing, which I find really rather touching, because one feels they have become really involved, and the people are real to them. One fan letter I had once, years and years ago, said, broadly speaking: “Dear Miss Sutcliff, I enjoy your books very much, and I hope that when you are dead you will go on writing books and I can go on reading them.”
Sussex, 1973
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Date: 2020-04-21 09:41 pm (UTC)I mean, I don't think they would be the kinds of stories Sutcliff liked to tell - either you get more domestic stories or you get upperclass women wielding soft political power, which is not really Sutcliff's jam (and I think she felt fundamentally differently about male and female warriors, given her immense discomfort with Boadicea and the difference between how Frytha and Bjorn are written in The Shield Ring; so I can't see her being super comfortable with Gráinne Ní Mháille/Grace O'Malley, for example). Yeah, women's roles were quite restricted, but the same is true of the average man - among the nonwealthy, entire families would just pretty much work all the time to sustain whatever business they were in and keep themselves fed and clothed. As far as writing about men in the military, which Sutcliff seemed to like, I don't see why that's necessarily radically different from earlier periods. (And in her earlier period stuff, she mostly enforces a pretty strong division between what men do and the Women's Side - that may or may not be very grounded in actual history.)
I think of the authors I've read, Donna Jo Napoli comes closer than most to the vivid sense of place I like, but I've found most of her books that I've read grindingly depressing/too far in the direction of The Past Had No Happiness for Women Ever for me.
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Date: 2020-04-22 01:50 pm (UTC)I'd love to have something to rec you that fit the bill, but I don't. Have you read The Perilous Gard? Dorothy Dunnett? The Roaring Girl?
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Date: 2020-04-26 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-27 11:12 pm (UTC)Sutcliff liked her wisewoman stock figure, maybe "wisewoman's apprenticeship" could have been in her wheelhouse. Or female miniature painter, she was obviously equipped for. Just need some background historical event to hang it on.